Take the Bronte family: the three sisters who lived into adulthood (Charlotte, Emily, Anne) all wrote novels, important books that are still read and studied today. Their brother, Branwell, was supposed to be the great genius of the family but never produced anything substantial - I've never studied the matter but I always got the sense that the expectations for Branwell were entirely because of his gender, and not due to any specific ability. But all four of them wrote, and they wrote together, or maybe just in and around each other's stories, when they were children. They invented worlds, and peopled them, and squabbled over the people in those worlds, causing schisms and an inevitable split, with two of the four packing up their stories and heading off to a separate continent.
All this while they actually lived in that famous remote parsonage in Haworth: the four children, their parson father, a housekeeper. Probably seeing people from the village all the time, but the story of isolation avoids mentioning that. Definitely remote, definitely separated, definitely just with each other almost all the time.
So they lived in their invented world as much as the real one: it was as important - more important.
Isabel Greenberg's third graphic novel Glass Town - her first to be set in the real world, not her invented Early Earth - tells that story, in a fictionalized form. Charlotte is at the center, and she usually is in tellings like this: she was the one who survived the longest, after all. (She died at the age of 38: in most contexts, that wouldn't count as very long at all.)
It opens with Charlotte in a field in 1849: she's the last of the four left alive. And she's met by one of her own characters, to tell her what has become of Glass Town, the city the four of them made, and of Angria, the country Glass Town sits in. (And to say nothing is known of Gondal, the land Emily and Anne created without the other two.) This is our frame story: he asks her to tell him the story they both know. And of course she does.
Greenberg says up front that this is a fictionalization - well, we know that as soon as a fictional character appears on the moors to talk to Charlotte - but that also means that any specific detail may be invented, or altered, or just never recorded in real history. So much of this could be true, or false, or somewhere in between. That's not important, though: the story is important.
The story is mostly about the Glass Town characters, and their complicated grand-opera affairs: the dashing rogue Zamorna, his colorless wife and her scheming evil father, Zamorna's real brother the gossip-merchant and foster brother the Black true king of this colonized land, and a few others. They're all tied up in a knot, and their story is bound to end with violent conflict and death.
I don't know if any of the Brontes ever wrote that ending. I don't know if they wrote competing endings, but I suspect they at least talked about it. I don't know if any of those potential endings exist. All I know is what Greenberg tells me here, in this version of their lives - how they battled over how the stories should go, with Charlotte and Branwell more warlike and Emily and Anne more domestic. That led to the split, as Greenberg tells it. But we now know basically nothing of Gondal, because none of those writings, except a few scraps of poetry, survived. So all we have is Glass Town, and the men maneuvering to kill each other over it.
It's difficult to tell a completely happy story about someone who died young a hundred and fifty years ago - not when you're covering a lot of her life, anyway. Glass Town is a book about creation and destruction, about living in the real world vs. living in invented ones...but it tends to come down on the side of destruction and invented worlds, as one should probably expect from a creator of fiction.
As in her previous books, Greenberg has an almost faux-naif art style, full of stiff figures with simple features, just expressive enough for her purpose. (If they look a bit like cutout dolls, or perhaps more specifically lead soldiers, that's not an accident.) It's a style that may be off-putting to people who read a lot of traditional comics - superhero, manga or YA - since it comes from a more deliberate artistic tradition, one that is not aiming to render things the way they look to the viewer.
Glass Town, because of that hundred and fifty years, because of Greenberg's art style and other choices, and because of the nature of Glass Town itself, is a bit chilly and detached - it's not a warm, welcoming story, and never would have been. Any reader will need to be aware of that, before they make the trip: the people of Glass Town have their own concerns, and will have little time for you.
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